sweet little old nun.
Then there was Sister Eileen herself. Somehow she seemed to be the cynosure of the hostility Lennon had uncovered. Pat was also concerned about Eileen’s present state. The crippling headache from which the nun was suffering seemed to make her more vulnerable.
Yet there was nothing Lennon could do about a premonition, or intuition, or a hunch. Staff reporters dealt in facts, events, reality, not in emotional reaction, no matter how strong it might be.
She sighed. Enough of this! Speculation was the purview of columnists and editorialists. She was a pawn in the chess game of journalism. Let’s turn this story out! She switched on the CRT.
“Lennon!” It was Bob Ankenazy.
She looked up and reflexively turned off the word processor.
“All hell’s broken loose at Van’s Can. A full-scale riot! The prisoners have barricaded themselves in the central dining area—the . . . uh . . . Big Top. The riot’s less than half an hour old. We’ve got three people on the scene. We need a rewrite and you’re it! Get on the phone—line three. The story’s coming in right now.”
This, she thought, is more like it. A breaking news story you can sink your teeth into. Nothing speculative or conjectural about this: X-number of prisoners have rioted, X-number of prison guards have been taken hostage, X- number of law enforcement officers will be gathering, armed with everything short of nuclear weapons. There will be X-number of prisoner demands. Eventually, X-number of public officials—mayor, police chief, maybe governor— will assemble.
The first need: Fill in the Xs. Then do a more complete, insightful job of it than either radio or TV, which will reach the public hours before the print medium will be able to tell the story. And, as rewrite, she would quarterback.
For no more than an instant, she thought of Joe Cox. Undoubtedly, he would be covering this for the
“Bill Dunnigan,” the voice identified.
As the story unfolded, Lennon pictured Dunnigan at the scene. Blond, mild-mannered, wearing granny glasses behind which soft blue eyes usually seemed wide with surprise. Dunnigan was the sort of reporter who could be depended on to bring in a careful story faithful to facts. Dunnigan was a professional in the best sense of the term.
“That you, Pat?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Good. What we’ve got here is an insurrection—a riot. Occurred at 12:25 p.m. in the central dining area—the Big Top, as the prisoners call it. That’s upper case B and T. Five guards—all male—have been taken hostage. So far, no one’s been hurt. None of the guards was armed. So the prisoners have no weapons except the tools and kitchen utensils they managed to appropriate. That would include screwdrivers, knives, and saws. Of course, to the hostages these things can be both frightening and threatening.
“Actually, the riot just got under way. So there isn’t much more to tell just yet. We know there will be demands made. But so far, we have no intimation of what they’ll be.”
“Is the entire prison population involved—all the inmates?” Lennon was feeding Dunnigan’s information into the CRT.
“No. Just the ones who were in the Big Top at that time. That would exclude those inmates restricted to their cells, the ones in solitary, and the ones in the ‘dog ward’—the most violent ones.”
Lennon liked that. Readers would relish getting acquainted with prison jargon like the “dog ward.”
“No,” Dunnigan continued, “not everybody. Maybe from 85 to 90 percent of the inmates are in on it. There’s talk that the prisoners themselves want to exclude three of their fellow inmates from the riot. None of us can figure that out yet. The word is that these three are born losers, considered jinxes by the others. If this is true, those three jerks must be the crap de la crap. It may make a good side-bar. I’ll get into that later. Right now, we’re waiting for the mayor, who’s supposed to be on his way over. I’ll be back to you.”
The connection went dead. Concise, factual, interesting, current, with a possible side-bar—everything you’d need to begin an important, breaking news story. Lennon had no sooner completed feeding the CRT when the phone rang again.
“Pfeiffer. This you, Lennon?”
Pat shook her head. Mark Pfeiffer was close to being the antithesis of Bill Dunnigan. Where Dunnigan was careful, factual, inclined to understatement, Pfeiffer was careless, and often inaccurate, with a massive ego—built up to defend an equally massive inferiority complex—that crowded out all consideration of others. Pfeiffer’s creed seemed to be: He that doth not tooteth his own horn the same shall not get tooted. Finally, Dunnigan was respected and liked by his peers, while Pfeiffer was neither respected nor generally liked.
“Yes,” Lennon responded wearily.
“Listen, this place is a madhouse. Everyone’s running around like their ass is on fire. Which reminds me, what are you doing tonight, Honey?”
Silence. Lennon knew of several
“Okay.” Pfeiffer was undaunted by Lennon’s stony silence. “We’ll pursue that and you later. Back to the dull stuff. Right now, nobody knows nothing. Seems some inmates got steamed and rioted at lunchtime. Nobody knows for sure whether they’re armed, but I’d lay you five-to-one they probably broke into the arsenal and got guns. Now that I think of it, I’d lay you for free gratis.”
Silence. Come to think of it, she’d contribute to a fund to have Pfeiffer castrated. Thank God for staffers like Dunnigan. From long experience as well as just the tone of his voice, she could tell Pfeiffer didn’t know what he was talking about. If she hadn’t had Dunnigan, she would have had nothing. She certainly wasn’t going to share a by-line with a nincompoop like Pfeiffer.
“Wait a minute, Sweetie,” Pfeiffer continued, “the mayor just got here. He’s being surrounded by the TV and radio creeps, and he’s got his usual entourage of bodyguards. But I’ll get to him. I’ll be right back with you, Honeypot.”
Not if I can help it, thought Lennon. The problem was, for this story she could not help it. She would have to listen to him, but she didn’t have to use anything he called in. And she was fairly certain she would use nothing of his. It wouldn’t make any difference. He wouldn’t recognize that— despite having his by-line with the others on the story—nothing that he had called in had been used. Lennon would have to rely on the dependable Bill Dunnigan and whoever the third reporter might prove to be.
The phone rang.
“Dunnigan. Pat?”
“Yeah.”
“The mayor’s here. Says it’s too early to comment; he’ll have to hear the demands before he can make a statement. The governor’s on his way. But right now, Mayor Cobb is the authority of record. It’s his jurisdiction and he’s not one to slough it off.
“Pat, this is gonna be a step-by-step procedure. We’re going to have to take one comment at a time. So stay with me and I’ll give you the developments as they happen. One thing: From everything I’ve been able to gather so far, this place is going to be shut up tight as a drum even after the riot’s been settled. It’ll be a long, long time before any of these guys get another visitor from the outside world.”
* * *
Father Koesler wondered why it had taken him so long to find the doctors’ lounge. It was an almost perfect place to wait for the bereaved when there had been a death in emergency or the operating room. The lounge was comfortable, some unseen hand kept the coffee brewing, and it was near the “quiet room” in that area of the hospital where the chaplain and the bereaved would meet.
Koesler was, indeed, waiting for just such an event. An elderly man had suffered a heart attack while shoveling snow. He was dead on arrival at St. Vincent’s emergency room. His next-of-kin had been contacted. Koesler was awaiting them.
In the lounge with Koesler were the members of an OR team, consisting of two surgeons—one of whom was Dr. Lee Kim—an anesthetist, a scrub nurse, and a circulating nurse. They had informed Koesler that they were
